Category: Men and Women

We’re Never Going to Change

by James Wallace Harris, 4/15/24

Years ago, I read This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. It was a passionate plea to act on climate change because if we didn’t everything would change. Her new book, Doppelganger, is a metaphor about our polarized society and what keeps us from changing even though Klein still makes a case that we need to change.

Between reading these two books I gave up all hope that humanity would change. I read Doppelganger as further proof that we won’t change even though Klein again passionately expresses the rational reasons why we should. I also believe we all need to change, but sadly, I don’t believe we will.

Doppelganger begins with Naomi Klein explaining how people on the internet often confused her with Naomi Wolf, a once respected feminist who is now considered a conspiracy crank. Klein uses the idea of the doppelganger as a metaphor for how to relate to our opposites, whether male/female, black/white, liberal/conservative, religious/atheist, Christian/Jew, Israeli/Palestinian, etc.

Klein goes to great lengths to make the metaphor work in several situations, but I found that distracting. What the book does exceptionally well is to ask: How do we decide what to do when half of us disagree with the other half? We all assume there is one truth, but everyone sees a different side of it.

In many chapters Klein makes Wolf seem ridiculous, but there are quite a few places where Klein recognizes Wolf’s point of view, or even gives her credit for being right.

I believe that extremists on the left act like naive young children, while extremists on the right act like selfish young children. In other words, I believe Klein is unrealistically hopeful, while Wolf is self-centeredly overly positive.

I must assume Klein writes her books believing we can still change. With Doppelganger she’s hoping that if we can get together and endeavor to understand each other we can make rational compromises. That would be lovely if she were successful and right. I believe Klein is right but won’t be successful.

We are doing essentially nothing towards controlling climate change. Wars, collapsing economies, and weather catastrophes are on the increase. Our responses are becoming more irrational, rather than wiser. We must face the fact that evolution works on all levels, and Darwinian conflict will always prevail.

The strong are going to take what they want at the expense of the weak. To solve all the problems Klein covers in her books would require overcoming our Darwinian natures and everyone acting for everyone else’s good. I no longer believe we’re capable of such altruism.

In the early days of Christianity, its philosophy was anti-Darwinian. But modern Christians have lost all their compassion. Christianity has been dissolving for centuries. The compassionate Christians gave up on God and became liberals, and the ones left became conservatives who rewrote Christian ideals with serving rationality that backs evolution.

In other words, I believe early Christianity, and 20th-century secular humanism were two times in history where we tried to fight our Darwinian natures, and in both instances, the movements failed.

We’re not going to change.

Not to end on a completely depressing note, I’ll try to offer a somewhat positive idea. Since we won’t change, the environment will. How can we use our Darwinian nature to build hardened societies that can survive climate catastrophes? Don’t read too much hope into that. What I’m saying is how can the strong survive the coming changes we chose not to avoid?

JWH

46 Years of Marriage and Television

by James Wallace Harris, 4/8/24

Susan and I celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary on March 26th. To commemorate the event, I’ve given myself the task of remembering all the TV shows we’ve watched together over the last 46 years. What’s been bugging me since 5:05 AM this morning has been trying to remember all the TV sets we watched all that TV on.

I can visualize the five apartments and two houses where we watched television. I can visualize the six cars we’ve owned over those forty-six years, but I can’t remember what the TV sets looked like from the early decades of our married life together. Obviously, we stared at them for hours a day so why can’t I remember what they looked like? I’ve checked my photos and can’t find any physical documentation. The first TV I can remember buying together was sometime after the year 2000 and it was a 36″ RCA monster of a CRT.

What’s funny is I can vaguely recall the TV stand we had when we first got married, a cheap aluminum affair on wheels. I assume we started off married life with a 19″ set I had owned as a bachelor. I just have no memory of it. I think we eventually bought a 25″ set, but it wasn’t a console. Just no memory whatsoever. I do remember that one of our first big purchases together was a VCR. We paid $800 around 1979. Susie used it to record soap operas to watch after work.

I believe we had cable TV at the beginning of our marriage because I just don’t remember using rabbit ears. And we had HBO before 1981 when MTV began, because I remember HBO playing music videos between movies and I loved them. That’s why I was so excited when MTV came out.

I enjoy challenging my memory with a specific task like this essay. And I’ve found that a fantastic way to trigger memories is to find an external anchor. I think the first show I can remember us watching together was I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theater. Wikipedia confirms that I, Claudius ran in Season 7 1977-1978. Since we met in July of 1977, that means my vague memory might be right.

My next memory is we watched the original All Creatures Great and Small Together. Wikipedia confirms it came out in 1978. However, I thought it came out on Masterpiece Theater, and Wikipedia nixes that idea. I also thought we were big fans of Masterpiece Theater, but Wikipedia reveals Susan, and I didn’t watch another series on that program until 1990 with Jeeves and Wooster. Looking over that Wikipedia page reveals we didn’t become big Masterpiece fans until Season 38 (2008) when they ran all the Jane Austen stories and have seen many of the shows since Masterpiece Theater was renamed Masterpience Classic. We really loved Downton Abbey starting in 2011. However, that might have been me, and not Susan. Thinking about it now, I think Susan was a latecomer to Downton Abby.

It’s funny how memories can be deceiving.

If we weren’t watching hi-brow shows, what else were we watching? I remember we both became addicted to MTV when it came out in 1981. Luckily, Wikipedia has pages for all the American TV seasons starting with 1945. I’ll use it as my memory crutch to recall our married life television viewing together. I’m only trying to remember what we watched together.

The first memory of the 1977-1978 schedule made me recall is Happy Days. Susan and I weren’t fans of that show, but I remember going over to her parents’ house and telling them we were getting married while they were watching Happy Days. (I was left alone with her dad to watch Happy Days while Susan’s mother took her in the back to ask if she had to get married.) The shows from that season that I remember Susan and I loving were Barney Miller and Soap.

For the 1978-1979 season we added Mork & Mindy, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Taxi to our watch list. This makes me remember that Susan and I loved sitcoms when we first got married. Normally, we went out a lot. We loved eating out at cheap places, or going to the mall, or the movies. I don’t think we watched a lot of TV in the early years.

In the 1982-1983 season we added Cheers on Thursday night on NBC. Taxi also moved to that night, and it became the early version of Must See TV on NBC on Thursday nights.

The 1984-1985 season added The Cosby Show to Must See TV night. Family Ties and Night Court also moved that time slot, so we had two hours of sitcoms.

Seinfeld started in the Summer of 1989. We loved that show.

Starting in the 1989-1990 season we added Roseanne to our list of sitcoms we tried to always catch. However, on Thursday nights in 1988, Must See TV was broken up and it got worse in 1989.

Looking over the schedules reveals something that conflicts with my memory. I thought we were TV addicts and watched all kinds of TV shows. But the schedules showed that for most nights there was nothing that we watched together, and I didn’t watch on my own. That makes me remember how often we went to the movies or rented videos.

I remember one time at Blockbusters they told us we had rented 794 movies. So, thinking about it, maybe Susan and I weren’t the TV fans I thought we were. But on the other hand, we loved buying the TV Guide every week. I’m thinking we might have watched more TV by ourselves, and I certainly don’t remember what Susan watched on her own. I think in the 1980s I vaguely remember Susan liking Murphy Brown and Designing Women. I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation without Susan.

In the Summer of 1990, we both fell in love with Northern Exposure, and I think we followed it faithfully until Joel left the series. I eventually watched all 110 episodes when it was syndicated on A&E, I think.

For the 1991-1992 season we added Home Improvement to our list of shows to watch. However, I believe Susan watched it more than me. Over the years, I think I started watching less TV.

We added Mad About You for the 1992-1993 season. We watched Seinfeld and Mad About You on Thursday together, and then Susan watched L.A. Law.

In the 1993-1994 season, Fraiser joined Must See TV and Wings moved to that night. We tried to always be at home for Mad About You, Wings, Seinfeld, and Frasier on Thursday nights.

The 1994-1995 season was big, because it added Friends and ER to Thursday nights. We now watched NBC from 7 until 10. I believe we stuck with Friends and ER for every episode. We both loved those shows.

We added 3rd Rock from the Sun for the 1995-1996 season. Obviously, by now my research is showing that Susan and I mostly watched sitcoms together. During these years I watched Nova on my own. But I don’t think I watched anything else by myself. I guess I wasn’t a broadcast TV addict like I’ve always thought I was. And I just don’t remember what we might have watched on cable channels.

During the next few years NBC kept monkeying around with Must See TV. I stuck for Friends, Seinfeld, and ER, but skipped on the other shows. I don’t remember if Susan watched the shows in between or not. Will & Grace and That ’70s Show came out in 1998 and we both loved them.

In the year 2000 Survivor premiered, and we followed that show together for over forty seasons. I stopped watching it this year because I didn’t like the new longer format.

In 2003, Susan got a job out of town, and lived in Birmingham, Alabama Sunday through Friday for ten years. She’d come home Friday night and go back Sunday afternoon. Those ten years completely threw us off watching TV together. When she finally transferred back to Memphis in 2013, we ended up each watching our own TVs, she in the living room, me in the den. We had completely adapted to diverse types of shows that each other didn’t like.

For those ten years I watched TV when friends came over. I got hooked on shows like Breaking Bad, The Americans, and Game of Thrones. Susan never did like this kind of television. On my own, I watched The Big Bang Theory. I believe that’s the last broadcast sitcom I’ve liked.

Nowadays, we get together twice a day to watch TV. Before supper, we watch Jeopardy and the NBC Nightly News together. Then from 9pm till 11pm we watch streaming TV series together. We’re currently watching Manhunt on AppleTV+, and We Were the Lucky Ones on Hulu. Before that we watched Feud: Capote and the Swans on Hulu and The New Look on AppleTV+. Sometimes we agree on a movie, but not that often. Before we liked sitcoms together, now we like shows that have a historical setting. Usually, they are limited series on streaming TV networks.

Lately, we’ve taken to one sitcom again, an old one. We watch Leave it to Beaver on Peacock on the nights when there are no new episodes of our other shows. Susan is still heavily addicted to sitcoms. She watches them all day long while she cross stitches.

JWH

My 2023 Interpretation of Hitchcock’s 1946 Film Notorious

by James Wallace Harris, 9/7/23

Alfred Hitchcock often talked about using the concept of the MacGuffin in his films. The MacGuffin distracts the audience into thinking the movie is about one thing when it’s really about something else. In Notorious (1946) we think the movie is about Nazis in South America acquiring uranium just after WWII. Instead, it’s about fucking. I hate to use the F-word here, but it’s the most exact terminology to make my point.

Back in 1946 movies couldn’t deal directly with sex, especially intercourse. Movies had to follow certain censorship guidelines, and so did books. It wasn’t until 1959 when the laws began to change, allowing art to become more explicit. What that meant was Hitchcock couldn’t directly focus on his theme. The MacGuffin suggested that Notorious was about war criminals and Nazis and that help Hitchcock hide his intended topic from censors.

People under seventy have only vague ideas about what people from the 1940s were like. We get our ideas about life in the 1940s from movies; in the same way we get ideas about American society of the 1950s from old television shows. However, Americans weren’t like the people we saw in movies, or read about in books. 1940s Americans were quite different from 2020s Americans. When we watch old movies from the 1940s, we must remember the censors wanted us to think one thing, the filmmakers another, and the actual reality of American lives were quite different still. There was far more sex going on, of all kinds, and persuasions.

Alfred Hitchcock uses Notorious to observe a very particular thing about Americans in 1946. Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is the daughter of a Nazi war criminal who has just been sentence to twenty years in jail. A government agent, T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) wants to use Alicia to infiltrate a Nazi plot in Rio de Janeiro. The government knows two things about Alicia. Because they bugged her conversations with her father, they know she’s pro-American and against the Nazis. Because they also know she regularly sleeps around and is alcoholic that she might be willing to do anything they ask. This is where the film title comes from, her notorious reputation.

Devlin contacts Alicia and Alicia falls in love with him because he appears to accept her as she is. She cuts back on her drinking and stops her cynical jaded sniping. Then Devlin tells her why they met and introduces her to his boss. This is when Alicia finds out that the American government wants her to seduce Alex Sebastin (Claude Rains) and get inside the Nazi organization.

This 1946 movie can’t have the feds saying, “we need you to fuck Alex Sebastin,” but the audience can read between the lines. Alicia is hurt. She can’t believe Devlin is asking this of her — doesn’t he love her? Alicia waits for him to tell her not to take the job. But Devlin wants her to say no on her own – – to prove she’s not a loose woman. Because Alicia is hurt that Devlin doesn’t stop her, she agrees to become a spy.

Throughout the rest of the movie, until near the very end, there is tension between Devlin and Alicia over her screwing Sebastian. The more Devlin becomes surlier and snarkier in his jealousy, the more Alicia applies herself to becoming the perfect Mata Hari. It’s never stated, but Hitchcock shows us the double-standard of the time. Not only are women not supposed to be sexually active outside of marriage, but they are also judged differently from men regarding what they choose to do. Audiences then, and now, would consider it nothing if a male secret agent seduced a woman spy for his country, but not for a female spy to make the same patriotic sacrifice.

Alicia rather quickly seduces Sebastian and lets Devlin know. He puts her down by suggesting a woman of her type would get the job done quickly. Eventually, Alicia marries Sebastian and goes on a honeymoon. She becomes part of his life.

I thought this part was interesting. Sebastian, the bad guy, is overjoyed to catch a woman like Alecia. He assumes she’s upright and moral. She’s younger, and quite beautiful. He is rich, suave, and sophisticated, but also shorter and much older. Sebastian and his mother totally accept Allecia into the family. On the surface, this is the path that 1940s (and 2020s) moral Americans wanted from women. The evil Nazi is proper family man, while the spies Alicia and Devlin are amoral and dishonest. What exactly is Hitchcock saying here?

At one point Sebastian sees Devlin and Alicia kissing and he’s tremendously hurt. But he doesn’t turn against her until he discovers she’s a spy. That mistake means he and his mother will be eliminated by his Nazi associates.

All through the Notorious, I wondered how Hitchcock was going to resolve his story. Not the spy story, that never mattered. It was the MacGuffin, and I knew it right from the start. If Devlin resented Alicia for fucking Sebastian and Alicia resented Devlin for arranging it, how would they ever come together?

I really didn’t want a happy conclusion to Notorious, but I knew one was coming. I wanted a 2020s realistic ending where Alicia wouldn’t forgive Devlin and tell him to fuck off in the end. However, I knew Hitchcock wouldn’t defy 1940s romantic convention in this film. He had to get Alicia and Devlin together.

In the end, Devlin admits he was wrong, and Alicia immediately forgives him. It wasn’t said directly, but I interpreted the scene to mean that Devlin apologizing for assuming Alicia would sleep with anyone because she had an active sex life. Of course, that ignores that Alicia did sleep with Sebastian, a man she previously rejected, because the American government asked. But is that the real story?

Like I said, sleeping with spies is something James Bond does all the time. I wondered if Hitchcock was also saying we should accept it when Jane Bond does it too? I doubt Hitchcock was concerned with this issue, but it’s there to consider. It’s possible that Devlin’s judging Alicia by a double standard was another MacGuffin, and Hitchcock’s real theme was about judging spies and their gender roles.

I do have another theory. Hitchcock might not care about anything we could put into words about in his films, but merely loves to create scenes with various kinds of emotional tensions to see how his audiences react to them emotionally. His films are often episodic, and he constantly plays with our reactions. Maybe the plots and themes are MacGuffins too?

JWH

Are Women Wanting the Dirty Jobs Men Don’t Want?

by James Wallace Harris, 8/17/23

[This is a repost after WordPress deleted the original.]

Yesterday YouTube offered me a video of two young women milling a 24′ rough log with a Wood-Mizer LT15 portable sawmill. It was fascinating. Yet, I wondered why two beautiful young women were milling a log. I figured these were just unique young women. Then YouTube offered me two more videos of women milling logs. Is this a new trend? I love watching videos of people making things and using machinery. And even though I’m 71 I still love looking at pretty women, so I’m not complaining about anything, especially not gender roles. (Although, don’t tell my wife, she might laugh at me watching pretty girls mill lumber.) I try not to be sexist but was I sexist because I assumed that some jobs were only going to appeal to men and was surprised at seeing these videos? Obviously, the videos showed me I was wrong — once again. Are you surprised?

I’m reminded of two sociological trends in the news over the past couple of years. One, is a lot of dirty jobs once done by men are going unfulfilled. Two, men are rejecting the job market in general, and some say it’s because of competition from women. One report says six million men between the ages of 25 and 54 are choosing to stay out of the work market.

I find YouTube to be a fun way of sampling what’s going on around the world. I’m seeing a lot of videos showing women doing things that once only men like doing. I think that’s great. However, I don’t know if YouTube is an accurate way to gather statistics or not. It could be women like to make videos more than men, or they feel doing something different will get more viewers. What percentage of women want to go into physically demanding jobs once considered only for males?

There seems to be millions of people, especially young people hoping to make a living producing videos. I know they must churn out content at a furious pace and do everything they can to do to get people to watch them. One thing that gets clicks is thumbnails pictures with pictures of pretty girls and clickbait titles.

At Lumber Capital Log Yard, Emerald and Jade are daughters in a family lumber business and milling lumber is something they like doing and are good at it. My guess is Emerald is the one who wanted a video channel, and she had an obvious interesting subject to film. That she and her sister are pretty enough to get into the movies is beside the point. The real interest of the videos is milling logs. But how many of their 150,000 subscribers are women, and how many of them will be inspired to go into the lumber industry?

I do worry about their attire for another reason. Men would be wearing protective clothing, hardhats, gloves, and goggles. And if male workers had beautiful long hair like the sisters, they’d tie it up while working around whirling industrial equipment. I assume the girls could be dressed differently for video days than when they aren’t on camera doing their work. But I could also be wrong here too, and women just want to wear whatever they like. I wonder what OSHA would say? If women take over dirty jobs, will how they do those jobs be different from how men did them?

This does make me wonder about gender roles. Men have always focused on their masculine attributes and hid their feminine side. And it used to be women did the opposite. Now women are displaying both openly and it’s upsetting some men. Several current studies are claiming women aren’t interested in men that can’t compete or keep up with them, and this is upsetting a percentage of men. Other studies are showing that some men don’t even want to try to compete in the workforce anymore. While other studies are showing women starting to dominate certain professions and men have stopped going into them. Those were mostly professional jobs. It was assumed that heavy manual labor would be the last bastion of male workers. That might not be true. Are there women wanting to work in mines, sewers, foundries, construction sites, etc.? I’m fine with that, but will society be fine with it? Politically, things are getting very weird.

And these changes aren’t just happening in the U.S. I’m seeing videos from around the world where women are doing all kinds of jobs or getting into extreme sports which used to only involve men. I’m reminded of a book I read years ago, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins. Back in 1960, people looked for jobs in the newspaper, and openings were listed in two sections: Men Wanted and Women Wanted — jobs were mostly divided by gender. I’ve seen a lot of change in the last sixty years, and Collins chronicles those work changes in detail. We might be getting close to the end of any gender division of labor.

Since I’m a science fiction fan, I like to extrapolate trends. What will things be like in twenty years? We’re obviously undergoing major social/gender transformation. Where will it take us? I’m all for women doing whatever they want, but it worries me that men can’t seem to handle this transition. What kind of backlash will they cause? The current political pendulum swinging to the right will get involved in this issue. How will it play out?

I’m quite envious of the young women who mill the lumber. I’m 71 and can’t lift shit anymore. I had hernia surgery last year, and I feel downright wimpy and weak. I’m overly impressed with the woman in the third video who is building a cabin on a cliff all by herself. I’m jealous of the young of any gender who have the stamina to do arduous work. I would never say someone should be restricted to the kind of work they do, but weird things are happening in society, and I wonder if some will.

I’m surprised by all the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime and will continue to see. Start watching YouTube, you might be surprised by what you find.

JWH

“Why Are All Your Friends Women?”

by James Wallace Harris, 11/17/22

While my sister was visiting last week we socialized with five of my friends. At one point, Becky asked, “Why are all your friends women?” I answered defensively, “I have male friends too,” but actually not that many. Well, two, if you don’t count several guys I interact with on the internet.

I’m writing this essay because this morning I was reading Flipboard and saw another article about how modern men don’t have friends. That made me think about Becky’s question and wondered if I had more female friends than male friends because guys don’t make many friends with other guys. I thought of bull elephants and male orangutans that spend most of their time alone in the jungle. Is it just natural for males to lead lonely lives?

One reason I don’t see more guys I know is that I don’t like leaving home, and neither do my male friends. My longest-running friendship is with a guy named Connell. We met in March of 1967 when we were in the 10th grade at Coral Gables High School in Miami Florida. We struck up a conversation over science fiction and astronomy. I moved away from Miami in 1970 but have remained friends with Connell ever since. But we’ve both stopped traveling and haven’t seen each other in more than twenty years. However, we do talk on the phone a couple times a week.

I met my other close male friend, Mike, in 1980 at work. He lives in Memphis. Susan and I are friends with Mike and his wife Betsy ever since then. We used to socialize more with them, and even travel together, but both Mike and I have become homebodies, especially after Covid, but also because we’re getting old and our health is in decline. Only my wife Susan still likes to go out or travel. I’m quite impressed with her for that.

I had many more male friends, but they have died, moved away, or I just lost contact with them.

Somehow I’ve been lucky to make several female friends which I’ve known for over twenty years. I see and talk to them all fairly regularly. Counting Susan my wife, and Becky my sister, I think the number of my women friends is eleven. Becky got to meet five of them, not counting Susan. I guess that’s why she asked her question.

Several of my women friends I met through Susan. Susan was and is much more social than I am. She has run around with several social groups over the course of our marriage. For a decade Susan took a job out of town and only came home for the weekends, and sometimes not even that. This forced me into socializing again. I started going to the movies with some of her friends or having them over to watch TV, and they became my friends. Two of my women friends were ones I made at work before I retired. And two were ones I made on my own. Our shared friendships were mainly based on movies, TV shows, books, and liberal politics.

If Susan had never worked out of town, I don’t know if I would have made all those women friends. I guess loneliness is the mother of socializing. I do wonder now that I’m in my seventies and want to socialize even less if my women friends will still want to stay friends. When Covid hit we all stopped going to the movies and eating out, and that put a big dent in what socializing I had left in me. By then Susan was back home and we hunkered down keeping each other company for those social distancing years.

If I had never gotten married I would probably be an old guy like those in all the articles. I think some of my women friends were friends with me because they considered me safe because I was married and unthreatening. I think women also like me because I’m willing to listen, and I have a high tolerance for lady chatter. I know that comment will irk some, but I’ve known a lot of guys who told me they broke up with women because they talked too much.

I would like more male friends. Actually, I would like more friends of any kind who share my interests, but that tends to be old guys. Before I retired I thought I had several male friends at work that I would stay in touch with after retiring. But it didn’t work out that way. Some of those guys were just too busy with their families, or they lived too far away in the suburbs. And a couple of them I just stopped seeing when politics got too polarized. Guys love their hobbies, and unless you’re friends share your hobbies, we seldom make the effort to meet up. Many men are just not that social.

When I was young I joined clubs, like the astronomy club, science fiction club, or computer club, and I made casual friends. But I’m just not a hobby club kind of guy and dropped out of all of them. I might have stayed in them if the internet hadn’t happened. The internet is probably the biggest reason why so many guys don’t have friends today.

And when men are social, the driving force behind it is to get laid. Once I got married I began losing interest in going out, especially to parties. And I have to admit that I made friends with so many women because I was also attracted to them. Nothing happened in that regard, but I believe I enjoy the company of women because I’m programmed to chase after women and to consider them pleasant company. I’ve wondered if I would keep up female friendships if that programming had been turned off.

Unless we have a shared interest I’m not sure guys have a reason to get together. I’m not sure we crave each other’s company. We like to compete with each other, and we like to work together on a project, build something, be on a team, work towards a goal, or fix something together. Women seem to have the ability to just be friends without a purpose. To just hang out. All those lonely guys in the articles seem to be both unlucky in love and without a purpose.

I do have shared interests with all my female friends, but it’s at a smaller percentage than I have with Mike and Connell. Actually, many of my interests and all my hobbies bore my women friends. I wish my female friends had more male-like qualities. Probably all of them would call me sexist if I said why. But then I’m often called sexist by my women friends because I like to make generalizations about males and females.

I do wonder about all the men in these articles who can’t make any friends. Maybe they never leave their apartment. You have to leave the house to make friends. That’s probably why I haven’t made any new friends in the last decade. And I have to wonder why men don’t make more female friends. Guys who are married probably are like me and gave up socializing after getting married. But unmarried guys should be out there socializing – especially if they are under fifty and still want to find a wife. However, I’ve known a lot of guys who told me they don’t like being friends with women, and once they gave up on getting married or getting laid, just gave up on women.

The internet has allowed me to make a lot of online male friends. But that’s because I get to meet people who are interested in my exact interests without leaving home. For example, I like science fiction magazines that were published from 1939-1975. I and two online friends, one from Great Britain and the other from South Africa, created a Facebook group devoted to science fiction short stories and it now has 642 members. Many of them love the same old science fiction magazines that I do. I used to have two friends that loved those magazines that lived in town. One died, and the other moved away. Sometimes it’s hard to find friends with the same exact interest.

JWH